The case of Edward Lee Elmore: SC inmate was freed after decades behind bars on death row

Family members hug Edward Lee Elmore after his hearing on Friday, March 2, 2012 in Greenwood, S.C. Elmore, who spent 30 years in prison for murdering Dorothy Edwards, a crime that Elmore said he did not commit, was set free by Judge Frank Addy on Friday. (AP Photo/Richard Shiro)(Photo: Richard Shiro, AP)

For nearly three decades, Edward Lee Elmore sat on death row, proclaiming all along that he didn't brutally rape and kill the elderly Greenwood widow who once employed him as a handyman.

For each year Elmore spent behind prison bars since 1982, he watched just as many likewise condemned men led to the execution chamber, his lawyer said.

On Friday, March 2, 2012, — on exactly the 11,000th day of his imprisonment after three separate convictions, endless pleas for freedom and a last-ditch ruling by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — the 53-year-old walked unbound from the Greenwood County courthouse after accepting a plea deal in exchange for a sentence of time served.

"There's nothing in the world like it," Elmore said after his belt chains were loosed and his prison slippers swapped for brand new dress shoes.

The story of Elmore's deliverance, told through testimony and mounds of court documents, boiled down to two vastly divergent theories — either he indeed stabbed 75-year-old Dorothy Edwards more than 50 times while raping her inside her home or police framed him by hiding and planting evidence.

The truth divided even the federal judges whose multi-year deliberations led to Elmore's release.

"All told, Elmore's is one of those exceptional cases of extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems," 4th Circuit Appeals Judge Robert King wrote in a three-judge opinion in November that reversed Elmore's conviction and instead cast suspicion on Edwards' neighbor, a now-deceased former Greenwood County councilman, as a possible killer.

However, the lone dissenter in the opinion, appeals judge Harvie Wilkinson, offered a scathing indictment of his colleagues' decision and defended the integrity of law enforcement and prosecutors.

"Elmore's conviction has withstood nearly three decades of intense scrutiny from multiple juries and judges for the best of reasons: There is so much evidence that supports it," Wilkinson wrote.

In the end, 8th Circuit Solicitor Jerry Peace told a judge that prosecutors would reluctantly cease efforts to keep Elmore in jail after Edwards' 72-year-old daughter, Carolyn Lee, told him that she was "tired" and "wanted peace" from endless court battles.

Brush with death

Elmore had been the longest-serving inmate on death row until a circuit judge in February 2010 commuted his death sentence to life in prison on the grounds that Elmore was mentally retarded.

In three separate jury trials, Elmore was sentenced to death.

The first trial, in 1982, was overturned by the South Carolina Supreme Court when it was determined that the judge had improperly influenced the jury.

In 1984, a jury convicted Elmore again — but the death sentence was set aside again after the U.S. Supreme Court found that the trial judge had improperly excluded testimony by a prison guard who would have attested to Elmore's good behavior in prison.

Two years later, another jury convicted Elmore and sentenced him to death, a sentence that stood through exhaustive appeals over the course of more than 20 years.

Edward Lee Elmore holds a copy of a book about his case on Friday, March 2, 2012 in Greenwood, S.C. Elmore, who spent 30 years in prison for murdering Dorothy Edwards, a crime that Elmore said he did not commit, was set free by Judge Frank Addy on Friday. (AP Photo/ Richard Shiro)(Photo: Richard Shiro, AP)

During those unsuccessful appeals, Elmore raised several concerns about the investigation and prosecution of his case — namely that his defense offered little resistance to police who failed to validate their evidence, leaving open suspicion that they fabricated the case to ensure his conviction.

Nearly two years ago, Elmore's attorneys drew one of their last arrows in a request to the 4th Circuit for rarely granted habeus corpus relief.

The effort paid off.

"Having scrutinized volumes of records ... we recognize that there are grave questions about whether it really was Elmore who murdered Mrs. Edwards," King wrote in his opinion, joined by fellow appeals judge Roger Gregory.

The 4th Circuit Court ordered the state to make a decision on whether to pursue murder, burglary and rape charges for a fourth time.

The case

The court's opinion laid out the alleged facts of the case and the framework of how the case languished for decades.

Edwards was a wealthy white widow who had employed Elmore — a black 23-year-old elementary school dropout — to do odd jobs at her Greenwood home around the time of her murder in January 1982.

The previous December, Edwards had hired Elmore to wash the windows and clean the gutters of her home.

On Jan. 18, 1982, a Monday, local police were alerted by Edwards's neighbor, now-deceased Greenwood County Councilman Jimmy Holloway, that he had just discovered her body in her bedroom closet.

Holloway immediately identified Elmore as a possible suspect and said that Elmore's name could be found in the widow's checkbook register. The following day, investigators matched a thumbprint on the exterior frame of the back door into the Edwards home where they believed the killer had entered.

Investigators relied on the thumbprint to arrest Elmore the next day, and he had remained behind bars ever since.

The prosecutors' theory was that Elmore wanted money and forced his way into Edwards' home, raping and killing her in her bed when she resisted, stabbing her dozens of times with needle-nosed pliers, a paring knife, a broken metal-and-glass ashtray, a serrated cake knife and bottle tongs.

Prosecutors believed that Edwards had been killed that Saturday, at a time of night when Elmore didn't have a reliable alibi, and the scene was cleaned and Edwards' body hidden in a closet.

A key collection of evidence was pubic hairs that prosecutors said were found on Edwards' bed and later determined to be Elmore's. Also, they said, blood matching Edwards' was found on jeans and shoes Elmore admitted to wearing that day.

Holloway testified for the state in the 1984 trial that he and his wife had been friends and neighbors of Edwards and the widow's husband since the 1940s.

Holloway said Edwards had told him on Saturday that she planned to go out of town the following day.

However, Holloway said that he became worried the following Monday when he noticed the Sunday and Monday editions of The Greenville News still lying in her driveway.

When he walked in, Holloway said he saw blood and the dentures and noticed a burning coffee pot, the television and an alarm clock blaring and a TV guide turned to Saturday.

Holloway said he went next door to ask a neighbor if Edwards had gone to the hospital. Holloway said he and the neighbor went into the home together and discovered Edwards' body in her bedroom closet.

The appeal

The 4th Circuit's review of the case determined that Elmore's defense attorneys failed to challenge the evidence established by police, particularly the discovery of hairs in Edwards' bed.

On appeal, Elmore's lawyers pointed out that police never photographed the hairs on the bed, leaving open the possibility that they were planted from samples taken from Elmore for DNA.

Years later, appeal lawyers concerned with the handling of evidence compelled prosecutors to produce evidence that had been left out of previous trials: a single hair that had been labeled as a fiber but in fact was a hair from an unknown white person.

The prosecutor in the case said he found the evidence 17 years later in a file case and that it was merely an oversight.

The 4th Circuit's review criticized the "blind acceptance of the state's forensic evidence" by Elmore's trial attorneys, including a coroner's claim that Edwards had to have been killed on the Saturday, a night in which Elmore couldn't offer an alibi.

The review also criticized Elmore's defense attorneys' lack of questioning of Holloway through an independent investigation.

In their defense, one of the trial attorneys said that the public defender's office was underfunded and that Holloway "never entered my mind" as a suspect because he knew him and believed the possibility of his involvement to be "ludicrous."

In later appeals proceedings, an expert witness for Elmore's defense said that Holloway's handling of finding Edwards' body was suspicious, particularly when he left the home without checking further to see if Edwards was inside.

Another hole in the case against Elmore developed when an inmate who had testified that Elmore admitted to the killing later recanted his testimony.

However, in his dissent, Wilkinson wrote that "the majority disregards the actual evidence and spins a fanciful conspiracy theory that cannot be squared with the facts of this case."

"Against this mountain of evidence, Elmore is able to construct no more than a small hill," Wilkinson wrote. "In the face of all this evidence, the majority is forced to fall back on Elmore's conspiracy theory that multiple members of the South Carolina law enforcement system framed Elmore."

Author Raymond Bonner, left, speaks to Edward Lee Elmore before his hearing on Friday, March 2, 2012 in Greenwood, S.C. Elmore, who spent 30 years in prison for murdering Dorothy Edwards, a crime that Elmore said he did not commit, was set free by Judge Frank Addy on Friday. (AP Photo/ Richard Shiro)(Photo: Richard Shiro, AP)

The discovery of a single hair wasn't enough to prove a conspiracy by law enforcement, and the opinion never offered an explanation of why Holloway would be motivated to rape and kill his neighbor and friend, Wilkinson wrote.

"While this story may make for a good movie, it does not stand up as a piece of legal analysis or bear resemblance to reality," he wrote. "While it may be tempting to purchase Elmore's freedom at the cost of an innocent man's good name, it is profoundly unjust."

Looking for peace

"I am innocent, your honor," Elmore told Circuit Judge Frank Addy after being asked if we wanted to enter a so-called "Alford plea," which allows a defendant to plead guilty admitting only that enough evidence exists for a jury to likely convict him.

The judge told Elmore that the only true way to clear his name would be to go to trial yet again.

However, Elmore's appeals attorney, Diana Holt, told the judge that Elmore would be better served pleading guilty to murder in exchange for a deal of time-served and dismissal of burglary and sexual assault charges.

"He did not do it," Holt told the judge. "Freedom is justice, and that is why we are doing this today."

Peace told the judge that prosecutors never entertained the idea of dismissing all charges, but that the decision to resolve the case came after talking to Edwards' daughter.

In pronouncing the sentence, Addy said that it was a "proper resolution" to the case.

Elmore had entered the court dressed in a collared shirt, vest and dress pants, but with a belt binding his hands and orange, prison-issued slippers.

Guards set Elmore free and led him down a hallway and out the back of the courthouse to the county jail. Elmore's attorneys waited outside and became incensed when told it would take four hours for Elmore to be "processed."

The attorneys contacted the judge, who ordered that Elmore be released immediately. The attorneys led him back through the courthouse and through the front door as family and a horde of media awaited.